Month: January 2011

The newest trend being released for mobile devices looks to solve the single most annoying, and fashion unfriendly look that business people and IT staff alike have had to face in the last 15 years. The growth of mobile devices in the workforce has led to many people carrying multiple devices, often a personal phone, a smartphone for work, or a Blackberry. This directly led to the dreaded multiple belt holster, or “batman belt.” In the past two months both Android, in conjunction with VMware, and Blackberry have announced products to eliminate the use of multiple devices.

Blackberry Balance and the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform both allow a consumer to bring their own smartphone into their corporate environment without an IT department worrying about security, compliance, or management challenges. This separation allows users to have personal applications like social media, gps, and games without compromising corporate email security.

The Blackberry app looks to run as just that, an app. This allows for corporate email to come from a Blackberry Enterprise Server and separates the email and calendar events from the rest of the personal blackberry.

By contrast, the VMware/Android platform will run what appears to be a complete smartphone for each use case, business and personal. Advantages to this platform will be the ability to turn off a business component or remove it remotely. Additionally, corporations will be able to publish corporate images regardless of phone type, minimizing the administrative tasks for IT departments. In theory, the VMware option will allow a user to move from company to company without making any changes to their personal device.

Both of these options may end up being cost savers for corporate IT shops in device acquisition, service plans, and staff hours. The ability to offload the device maintenance and service cost to the employee could be the hook that RIM needs to stay in the corporate environment. These same features and flexibility could bring Android to the forefront of enterprise mobile devices. Now the two real questions will be what Apple will do to stay competitive in the corporate/personal front, and what is going to happen to all those belt clips?

While preparing this series of blogs on virtual desktops, it occurs to me that virtual desktop, like all technologies, has its own set of acronyms and terminology that may not be commonplace for everyone, but are necessary to define and understand. With that in mind, this first blog is actually a condensed glossary of acronyms and terms relevant to virtual desktop solutions. My next blog will outline the steps necessary to roll out a virtual desktop infrastructure in your environment… not surprisingly, the terms below will be used frequently:

VDI: Acronym for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure; this is the entire environment required to run virtual desktops including servers, storage, endpoints (thin or thick clients), software, and images.

Hardware Thin Client: A hardware device that replaces a traditional desktop or laptop. Hardware thin clients have few or no moving parts and provide ports for peripheral device connections (keyboards, mouse, monitor, etc.)

Connection Broker: The connection broker maintains a list of available virtual desktops, and when a client makes a request it provides the client with the connection information (including authentication) for the appropriate virtual desktop.

Base Image: A base image is the minimum desktop and application requirements for a set group of users. This would be used as a starting point for all full desktop deployments. A base image will allow you to minimize the applications that need to be managed when deploying desktops. When you know that office, a PDF reader, and your main enterprise application will be used by every employee, why would you want to manage them separately?

Full Clone: A full clone is an exact replica of a virtual machine at a point in time. This clone will take the same storage and performance requirements of the original image. The full clones are normally used when you have group of desktops that will be assigned to a specific user group, and they allow you to install applications or any other desktop customization. Full clones are your most resource-intensive group of virtual desktops that can be deployed and should be used only when absolutely needed.

Replica Disk: The replica disk is a full clone of the base image that is used to take snapshots of the base image for the creation of linked clones. This is normally a read-only copy of the base image. If you created linked clones you will take a snapshot of the replica disk and users will work off of the snapshot. This consumes the full CPU and memory resources of the base image, but only for changes done by the user.

Linked Clone: A linked clone is a snapshot of a replica disk that is accessed by users. This snapshot only consumes the storage resources as it is used. A full sized clone would take the same amount of storage as the original. This will allow you to save upwards of 90% of the storage needed for a full desktop clone pool.

Virtualized applications: Virtualized applications are applications that have been packaged to run independently of the operating system. Virtualized applications can be presented to desktop pools or shared via file share. These virtualized applications would be used to augment a base image. The application that might be used by one department in addition to the standard apps could be virtualized to ease management.

Persistent vs. Non-Persistent: A persistent pool would mean that a user would always access the same virtual desktop; this is most commonly used when a user has access to make changes to their system, for instance, administrative rights or application installs. In a non-persistent or floating pool, the user could receive any desktop in the pool. Floating pools are most often used in office environments or call centers. When any user logs in they could get any machine in the pool and their profile would migrate with the user.

User Profile: The user profile can include all the settings that a user would change, to include the desktop background, files and icons on the desktop, and any settings assigned through application installation. User profiles are part of a user’s active directory profile and are used regardless of a physical or virtual desktop.